James Travers.TRAVERS REALTY CORP. It was a tribute, of a sort, to James Travers James Travers VC CB (6 October 1820-1 April 1884), born Cork he was an Irish recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. , when the prestigious Jonathan Club The Jonathan Club is a prestigious private social club in Los Angeles, California, U.S. It maintains two clubhouses, one in downtown Los Angeles at 545 South Figueroa Street (built in 1924) and one on the beach in Santa Monica. in downtown Los Angeles Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area. The sprawling, multi-centered megacity is such that its downtown core is often considered just another district like Hollywood or resoundingly re·sound v. re·sound·ed, re·sound·ing, re·sounds v.intr. 1. To be filled with sound; reverberate: The schoolyard resounded with the laughter of children. 2. rejected him for membership. Although no club members have come forward to explain their reasons for spurning the New York-born broker, Travers says he assumes his defeat was engineered by a cabal of landlords and brokers who still had not forgiven him for his relentless manner at the negotiating table. "I guess some people hold a grudge," he says, a little ruefully rue·ful adj. 1. Inspiring pity or compassion. 2. Causing, feeling, or expressing sorrow or regret. rue . But the same qualities that kept Travers out of the wood-paneled rooms of the Jonathan Club have made him extraordinarily popular in the board rooms of his tenant clients. Since establishing his tenant representation brokerage, downtown L.A.-based Travers Realty Corp., he has become the personification personification, figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstract ideas are endowed with human qualities, e.g., allegorical morality plays where characters include Good Deeds, Beauty, and Death. of the aggressive tenant's broker, with a take- no-prisoners attitude. He has been known to raise his voice. He is admired, feared, and sometimes resented. Up and down the West Coast, it seems, every broker has a Jim Travers anecdote. More than anything, however, Travers gets results. Among his recent trophies are deals for Health Net (195,000 square feet in Woodland Hills), Tokio Marine (124,000 square feet in San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden ), and Gibson Dunn & Crutcher (360,000 square feet nationwide). Travers conducts his 20-broker business as a boutique in which his own talents are front and center. He likes to transact as many deals as possible, and is unusual among top-flight brokers for not disdaining the tiny sublease sublease n. the lease of all or a portion of premises by a tenant who has leased the premises from the owner. A sublease may be prohibited by the original lease, or require written permission from the owner. as well as the major corporate relocation. He sees himself as the tenants' defender in the cut-throat environment of commercial real estate. Landlords, he argues, are accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of the office market, and are accustomed to hardball negotiations with architects, contractors and brokers. "Sophisticated landlords are tough as nails," he says. "If you were negotiating to buy steel, you would definitely try to buy at the cheapest possible price, and that is how I see what we do for tenants -- to make clients as competitive as they possibly can be. We bring parity to the table. The downtown Los Angeles-based broker seems to be everywhere at once. In addition to his offices in L.A. and Orange County, Travers regularly conducts business in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, while pursuing deals in Texas and New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of . "I'm all over the place," he says. One of his recent out-of-town achievements has been the completion of a site selection and lease in Colorado for Guarantee National Corp., the largest insurer in that state. That deal was for a 150,000-square-foot build-to-suit. At any given time, Travers is working on at least six deals simultaneously, he says. How does he keep them all straight in his head? "I don't know Don't know (DK, DKed) "Don't know the trade." A Street expression used whenever one party lacks knowledge of a trade or receives conflicting instructions from the other party. . If I ever thought about the process, I would probably get myself screwed up," he concedes. Travers traces his interest in "tenant rep" back to his earliest days in the business in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. , where he primarily represented landlords as a fledgling broker. "I was amazed to see how much money was being left on the table (by tenants)," he remembers. Travers came to California on the advice of a real estate professor at New York University New York University, mainly in New York City; coeducational; chartered 1831, opened 1832 as the Univ. of the City of New York, renamed 1896. It comprises 13 schools and colleges, maintaining 4 main centers (including the Medical Center) in the city, as well as the , who told him, "Take your New York knowledge and go west." After arriving in town in 1974, he worked for several local brokerages before hanging out his own shingle in 1978. His "hook" was to be exclusively a tenant representative, a practice which Travers claims to have pioneered on the West Coast. Travers developed business the old-fashioned way: by pounding the pavement and knocking on doors. Today, he says, he develops business "the same way, knocking on doors and meeting people." Where does he find the time? "The days are long and complete. We are constantly trying to build up our company." While he is aware the office broker is a threatened species, Travers says he does not plan to diversify into consulting or other service lines, as have most other brokerages. "The whole goal is to provide a depth to our services by keeping tenant rep as our only focus," he explains. What is his secret as a broker? "I go in there very well prepared, and I just negotiate," he says. "I don't deviate from the terms that are correct for our clients. We are not interested in the current market value (of office space). We are interested in making a contribution to our client's bottom line. That's what drives us." |
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